First of all, traditional tailoring was gradually being replaced by the industrial garment industry, so that as the years went by he gradually lost client after client, some of whom were well known in Porto Alegre—journalists, politicians, soccer players, police chiefs. Secondly, as he grew older Mousy started to develop some peculiar theories regarding clothing. He maintained, for example, that the left sleeve should be shorter than the right (“that way folks can look at their wristwatch more easily”) and he tailored jackets in conformity with this idea, which obviously puzzles—and irritated—many of his clients. 1 We pray and the resurrection happens. Here are the young again, sniping and giggling, tingly as ringing phones. 2 All we ask is that our thinking sustain momentum, identify targets. The pressure in my lower back rising to be recognized as pain. The blue triangles on the rug repeating. Coming up, a discussion on the uses of torture. The fear that all this will end. The fear that it won’t. 2 To be awake is to discriminate among birdcalls, fruits, seeds, “to work one’s way,” as they say, “through.” A diversity noir hit in which a shape-shifter and a vampire run rival drinking establishments. Apes can mind-read. Studies show what makes us human is our tendency to point. 1 Our first gods were cartoon characters — quirks and quarks — each dead wrong, and immortal. 2 Silence is death and silence is dead-air. Give a meme a hair-do. Give it a split-screen. Make it ask itself the wrong question. Make it eat questions and grow long. 1 The sun on my back like your hand at night, in bed, and then again, your hand on my back at night like the sun has burned through two-thirds of its fuel. “want to turn on CNN, see if there’ve been any disasters?” * In the dream, you slip inside me. Ponzi scheme; rhyme scheme. The child wants his mother to put her head where his is, see what he sees. * In the dream inside the dream, our new roommates are arguing: “These are not Astroturf calls, and we’re all populists now.” * Now an engine’s single indrawn breath. (the black hole at the heart of it is taking it all back.) * An immigrant sells scorpions of twisted electrical wire in front of the Rite Aid. Answer a moment of stillness, demanding an answer. When does a moment end? * Starbucks prayer, “Make morning good again.” * Leaf shadows on pavement: word meaning to slide carelessly, repeatedly, to absentmindedly caress. * For I so loved the world that I set up my only son to be arrested. Ground Custom content feed. Let me tell you something personal. As a child, I worried about quicksand. I don’t know why I mention this. I feel no connection to the child who had that fear, instilled, as it was, by ’50’s films about explorers, hokey and tainted now. I hold out my hand. * Brownian motion; primal shudder. The way it’s hotter to go to bed with someone while imagining yourself to be another person. When I recount my experiences, whatever they may have been, I’m aware of piping tunes I’ve heard before. Or jumbled snatches of familiar tunes. The fancy cannot cheat for very long, can it? In the moment of experience, one may drown while another looks on. Second Person Lemons, lanterns hang late into the evening. but you are known for your voluptuous retreat, for leaving your absence on the air, illicit, thin. I know you think I wonder if you think of me. This reflection spins, a bead on a strong. I can take it with me. Soft Money They’re sexy because they’re needy, which degrades them. They’re sexy because they don’t need you. They’re sexy because they pretend not to need you, but they’re lying, which degrades them. they’re beneath you and it’s hot. They’re across the border, rhymes with dancer — they don’t need to understand. They’re content to be (not mean), which degrades them and is sweet. They want to be the thing-in-itself and the thing-for-you — Miss Thing — but can’t. They want to be you, but can’t, which is so hot. Chain Chain Chain The argument from clean margins. Get plausible! Some feed off breakage, some off transposition. Minute by minute. Tread water with synonyms; trade synonyms for water. Outage 1 We like to think that the mind controls the body. We send the body on a mission. We don’t feel the body, but we receive conflicting reports. The body is catching flak or flies. The body is sprouting grapefruit. The body is under- performing in heavy trading. 2 Reception is spotty. Someone “just like me” is born in the future and I don’t feel a thing? Like only goes so far. Cancellation The idea that, if I say it well enough, fear will be gone. If I say it well enough to make you believe The idea that, if you believe me, our two beliefs will cancel one another out. * In the departure gate, the bag atop her bag spells “Paradise” . . . Paranormal. Parable. Syllable as passenger. * A woman on a cell phone tries: “Are you annoyed?” “Mom seemed . . . good.” * Last night, suddenly, my head or the room was spinning. Now the airline’s name rises to the top of the screen and disappears. 1 To our amazement, when fed on fatty acid, the vesicle did not simply grow, it extended itself into a filament. Now the king’s youngest daughter said, “I wish I had something like that,” — and the whole vesicle transformed into a slender tube which was quite delicate. 2 Monks mimed one another’s squiggles carefully by candlelight as if they thought creation trailed something, as if they knew creation looked like this from what is always the outside. * Blow into the tube to inflate the Quick, before you die, describe the exact shade of this hotel carpet. What is the meaning of the irregular, yellow spheres, some hollow, gathered in patches on this bedspread? If you love me, worship the objects I have caused to represent me in my absence. Objections thanks to the Blankety-Blank, packets can pop out of empty space. So a neutrino Can pluck a W boson from the blank and pass it on. * A man shoves books into mailers each morning, in a happy rush, imagining the pleasure of his customers, the praise they may post on Amazon. * I shut my eyes, not thinking, feeling bursts of irritation, pulses behind closed lids, each flicker an objection without object. * Unite my heart, beaten small in the secret place of thunder. Sway Caught up in the leaf, entranced, the carbon atom gets a life — but whose life is it? * A slender whirlpool, momentary poppy, sways over a drain. Forget her. She doesn’t love you. You will never have such grace. This Is 1 “If you can read this, you’re too close.” This has been specially handcrafted in Mexico. “Hi, you’ll do” on a tee-shirt made by young girls in Thailand? America poses in whose mirror? Irascible. Insouciant. 2 This is a five star trance. To have this vantage from the cliff’s edge, to get drunk on indifference, to sare at a bright succession of crests raised from nothing and flattened. Money Talks 1 Money is talking to itself again in this season’s bondage and safari look, its closeout camouflage. Hit the refresh button and this is what you get, money pretending that its hands are tied. 2 On a billboard by the 880, money admonishes, “Shut up and play.” Win Card in the mail: “Win a free cremation.” Real Article Everything I know is something I’ve repeated. Lazy horn solo tries to wander off, but can’t, or does, and we don’t notice. Veterans Day flags lap idly at their poles. The day is warm. “The.” Translation is always a treason, and as a Ming author observes, can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade,—all the threads are there, but not the subtlety of colour or design. The Sung allegory of the Three Vinegar Tasters explains admirable the trend of the three doctrines. Sakyamuni, Confucius, and Lau Tzu once stood before a jar of vinegar,—the emblem of life,—and each dipped in his finger to taste the brew. The matter-of-fact Confucius found it sour, the Buddha called it bitter, and Lao Tzu pronounced it sweet. We might add here that the altar of the Zen chapel was the prototype of the Tokonoma,—the place of honour in a Japanese room where paintings and flowers are placed for the edification of the guests. The kettle sings well, for pieces of iron are so arranged in the bottom as to produce a peculiar melody in which one may hear the echoes of a cataract muffled by clouds, of a distant sea breaking among the rocks, a rainstorm sweeping through a bamboo forest, or of the soughing of pines on some faraway hill. “Young fool,” chided the tea-master,” that is not the way a garden path should be swept.” Saying this, Rikyu stepped into the garden, shook a tree and scattered over the garden gold and crimson leaves, scraps of the brocade of autumn! What Rikyu demanded was not cleanliness alone, but the beautiful and the natural also. Would that we loved the ancients more and copied them less! It has been said that the Greeks were great because they never drew from the antique. We find it trying to talk to a man while his full-length portrait stares at us from behind his back. We wonder which is real, he of the picture or he who talks, and feel a curious conviction that one of them must be fraud. Many a time have we sat at a festive board contemplating, with a secret shock to our digestion, the representation of abundance on the dining-room walls. Why these pictured victims of chase and sport, the elaborate carvings of fishes and fruit? Why the display of family plates, reminding us of those who have dined and are dead? One is reminded in this connection of a story concerning Kobori Enshu. Enshu was complimented by his disciples on the admirable taste he had displayed in the choice of his collection. Said they, “Each piece is such that no one could help admiring. It shows that you had better taste than had Rikyu, for his collection could only be appreciated by one beholder in a thousand.” Sorrowfully Enshu replied: “This only proves how commonplace I am. The great Rikyu dared to love only those objects which personally appealed to him, whereas I unconsciously cater to the taste of the majority. Verily, Rikyu was one in a thousand among tea-masters.” As a Chinese critic complained many centuries ago, “People criticise a picture by their ear.” We classify too much and enjoy too little. Nothing is real to us but hunger, nothing sacred except our own desires. Shrine after shrine has crumbled before our eyes; but one altar is forever preserved, that whereon we burn incense to the supreme idol,—ourselves. Our god is great, and money is his Prophet! We devastate nature in order to make sacrifice to him. We boast that we have conquered Matter and forget that it is Matter that has enslaved us. What atrocities do we not perpetrate in the name of culture and refinement! Tell me, gentle flowers, teardrops of the stars, standing in the garden, nodding your heads to the bees as they sing of the dews and the sunbeams, are you aware of the fearful doom that awaits you? Dream on, sway and frolic while you may in the gentle breezes of summer. To-morrow a ruthless hand will close around your throats. You will be wrenched, torn asunder limb by limb, and borne away from your quiet homes. The wretch, she may be passing fair. She may say how lovely you are while her fingers are still moist with your blood. Tell me, will this be kindness? It may be your fate to be imprisoned in the hair of one whom you know to be heartless or to be thrust into the buttonhole of one who would not dare to look you in the face were you a man. It may even be your lot to be confined in some narrow vessel with only stagnant water to quench the maddening thirst that warns of ebbing life. Flowers, if you were in the land of the Mikado, you might some time meet a dread personage armed with scissors and a tiny saw. He would call himself a Master of Flowers. He would claim the rights of a doctor and you would instinctively hate him, for you know a doctor always seeks to prolong the troubles of his victims. He would cut, bend, and twist you into those impossible positions which he thinks it proper that you should assume. He would contort your muscles and dislocate your bones like any osteopath. He would burn you with red-hot coals to stop your bleeding, and thrust wires into you to assist your circulation. He would diet you with salt, vinegar, alum, and sometimes, vitriol. Boiling water would be poured on your feet when you seemed ready to faint. It would be his boast that he could keep life within you for two or more weeks longer than would have been possible without his treatment. Would you not have preferred to have been killed at once when you were first captured? What were the crimes you must have committed during your past incarnation to warrant such punishment in this? The wanton waste of flowers among Western communities is even more appalling than the way they are treated by Eastern Flower Masters. The number of flowers cut daily to adorn the ballrooms and banquet-tables of Europe and America, to be thrown away on the morrow, must be something enormous; if strung together they might garland a continent. Beside this utter carelessness of life, the guilt of the Flower-Master becomes insignificant. He, at least, respects the economy of nature, selects his victims with careful foresight, and after death does honour to their remains. In the West the display of flowers seems to be a part of the pageantry of wealth,—the fancy of a moment. Whither do they all go, these flowers, when the revelry is over? Nothing is more pitiful than to see a faded flower remorselessly flung upon a dung heap. When the flower fades, the master tenderly consigns it to the river or carefully buries it in the ground. Monuments are sometimes erected to their memory. A writer in the middle of the last century said he could count over one hundred different schools of flower arrangement. Broadly speaking, these divide themselves into two main branches, the Formalistic and the Naturalesque. The Formalistic schools, led by the Ikenobos, aimed at a classic idealism corresponding to that of the Kano-academicians. We possess records of arrangements by the early masters of the school which almost reproduce the flower paintings of Sansetsu and Tsunenobu. The Naturalesque school, on the other hand, accepted nature as its model, only imposing such modifications of form as conduced to the expression of artistic unity. Our personal sympathies are with the flower-arrangements of the tea-master rather than with those of the flower-master. The former is art in its proper setting and appeals to us on account of its true intimacy with life. We should like to call this school the Natural in contradistinction to the Naturalesque and Formalistic schools. The tea-master deems his duty ended with the selection of the flowers, and leaves them to tell their own story. Entering a tea-room in late winter, you may see a slender spray of wild cherries in combination with a budding camellia; it is an echo of departing winter coupled with the prophecy of spring. Again, if you go into a noon-tea on some irritatingly hot summer day, you may discover in the darkened coolness of the tokonoma a single lily in a hanging vase; dripping with dew, it seems to smile at the foolishness of life. In such instances we see the full significance of the Flower Sacrifice. Perhaps the flowers appreciate the full significance of it. They are not cowards, like men. Some flowers glory in death—certainly the Japanese cherry blossoms do, as they freely surrender themselves to the winds. Anyone who has stood before the fragrant avalanche at Yoshino or Arashiyama must have realized this. For a moment they hover like bejewelled clouds and dance above the crystal streams; then, as they sail away on the laughing waters, they seem to say: "Farewell, O Spring! We are on to eternity." 2 ———— The task of craft is to recognize those minor traditions which, through their inconspicuous yet nonetheless transformative force, are capable of revivifying the present by means of the release of essentially alive gestural relationships with materiality. The truth of craft is formal, yet not fixed. 5 ———— Pleasure is only apolitical to those who have never been subject to its willed and policed historical foreclosure. The diversification of pleasure as aesthetics, by means of a convivial bodily effervescence of form, is part of the necessary politics of the present. One or craft's uses is to decorate. Decoration is memory externalized. Whose decor shall we inhabit? Perhaps now, rather than less, we need more decoration, but of our own devIsing, as homeopathic antidote to the ubiquitous mass-produced décor called information. 6 ———— Some say the city is a loom, some say it is a boat. I would rather not choose. But in the long history of cities, many worthy sentences have unfurled from the loom of the bed. 7 ———— And then we rise from OUR LOOM-LIKE BEDS to dress ourselves. If thread communicates meaning, it's because its structure twists. These bedclothes and garments are mobile theses on the corporality of time. 8 ———— The meaning of gesture changes; the repetition in time of a formal constraint or technical convention tends inevitably to cause a shift in the semantics of its site. In this sense, craft, in its simultaneous expression of repetition and difference, reveals its site as such. The craftwork amplifies a spirited conversion: site becomes object, and object becomes site. Conversion here is another word for subjectivity. 9 ———— The craftwork, Goetheian, shows that all continuity is transformation. It was Goethe who stated of the morphology of plants, "Everything is leaf." Bud, stem, petal, sepal, fruit: every part is incipient leaf. THE CRAFTWORK IS BECOMING INCIPIENT LEAF. As leaf it inherently differs. 10 ———— Craft, the prolongation of a formal event, demonstrates some of the possible terms of survival, where survival is a life-beyond-life. A shaped duration of attention becomes both record and catalyst. Craft insists that the present is composed of the simultaneity of times. 13 ———— Will the new techniques of liberty write themselves on a selvage rather than in the identifiably public square? 15 ———— Craft's gestural intelligence is apt to discover material potential only by internalizing and inhabiting the specificities of a tradition. This tradition knows JOY IS FORMAL INTELLIGENCE. CRAFT'S TRADITION IS JOY. 16 ———— Joy is suppressed by the wrong-hearted vision of time as sadness. There is no loss in craft's continuity, only a temporal proliferation. The loss is rather in the foreclosure of craft and its SITUATED KITS of knowledge. Where a technique is lost, a variety of happiness perishes. 17 ———— What the various fundamentalisms, including the fundamentalism of the avant-garde, must go to grievous lengths to deny and suppress is the glamorous truth that to continue is inevitably to innovate upon the evolving terms of a tradition. It is not necessary to reject the past, nor its representations. Craft devotedly affirms and distributes the detailed refusal of both end-thinking and iconoclasm. This devotion borrows its force from an apprehension of the laws of matter, which produce newness paradoxically, without annulling history. I LEARN WILD DEVOTION FROM CRAFT. 18 ———— Materiality provides both freedom and limitation. That limitation, however, is not derived from human institutions of authority, but from inexorable material laws. Material provides the limits by which the imagination might exercise its inventions. The abandonment of convention, however ardently desired, can never be entire because convention is itself a constellation of traces of historical relationships with matter. And yet BECAUSE WE CRAVE FREEDOM the differentiation must be made. Material will teach us whore the new threshold between convention and freedom shall appear. WHEN I SEE FORM, I WITNESS LIFE. 22 ———— It's about handwork. We might slap up manifestoes, rifle pockets, fan and ruffle and twist up our hair, smooth the coats of our animals, vigorously button our duffle coats, count out coins, slide our fingers over our various devices with a knitting motion and THROUGH THAT LUMINOUS KNITTING fall in love and learn about politics. Or we may stay in bed among softly coiled blankets and write, our animal at our feet. Slowly we construct a fabric with the movement of our hands. 24 ———— Craft teaches us that style is never finished. The present, borrowed or perhaps inherited as our material project, is never finished. There is always something to do. 25 ———— 26 ———— CRAFT, AGAINST DEATH. I discovered the most interesting coincidence when I later began to research – Charles Baudelaire was born in 1821, the same year the word ‘menopause’ was coined by the Parisian doctor Charles de Gardanne, in his book De la Menopause, ou de l’age critique des femmes. It was also in 1821 that the English word ‘dandy’ first entered literary use in France, with Charles-Louis Lesur in his Annuaire historique universel, an annual collation of administrative, financial, meteorological and diplomatic documents, with a chronicle of events and notes contributing to the history of arts and letters. Stendhal was to help to popularize the term, is his 1822 book, De l’Amour. But even in English the term was new, its first recorded use, in 1816, coinciding with the ur-dandy Beau Brummel’s debtor’s exile in France. The word’s origin is obscure – perhaps it’s from the border-region term ‘jack-a dandy’, perhaps it’s from the Hindi word for ‘boatman’. Thomas Carlyle, in his 1835 tract on the philosophy of the dandy, Sartor Resartus, defines it like this: A dandy is a Clotheswearing Man, a Man whose trade, office, and existence consists in the wearing of Clothes. Every faculty of his soul, spirit, purse and person is heroically consecrated to this one object, the wearing of Clothes wisely; so as others dress to live, he lives to dress. Baudelaire’s own dandiacal tendencies ran to the wearing of rose-coloured gloves – alone, this accessory detail was simply very stylish for a young man of the time, but Baudelaire, according to his friend the photographer Nadar, was to be seen strolling in his neighborhood wearing his rose gloves with a blue workman’s smock, a blood red cravat and a magenta chenille boa, of the sort that the minor actresses of the city apparently affected. But here I want to say that Baudelaire’s appropriation and redefinition of the term ‘dandy’ differed in its essentials from the standard meaning. Beyond the elegant foppery of Beau Brummel, beyond even the vestal allegory of Carlyle, Baudelaire’s dandy subtly emanated a spiritual reserve, an inner aristocracy – that same reserve he described in ‘Les Veuves’ as the stoical pride of the old woman: ‘like an old bachelor, the masculine character of her manners added a mysterious spice to their austerity’. In celebration of these correspondences I lay in the bath all morning, reading excerpts from ‘The Painter of Modern Life’. This is the text where, in a long exploration of the work of draftsman and journalistic engraver of everyday life Constantin Guys, the poet presents the core of his transformed theory of dandyism. Independence of character, leisure, absolute simplicity, an inner, spiritual aristocracy, an ‘ardent need to make of himself something original’ – all of these self- fashioning gestures were nonetheless contained within the external limits of social propriety. A dandy was not a rebel, not punk. He pertained to the spiritual aestheticization of limits. In a sense Baudelairean dandyism could be seen as a constraint-based practice on the self. The distinctive stance of the Baudelairean dandy is the subtraction of all utility and all ambition from everyday life. Although he may be rich, money is never the dandy’s goal, nor is political or social power of any kind; leisure is the key dandiacal element. Love is permitted, but not typically in its conjugal, domestic form. The dandy recoils from all use value, all production, all reproduction, and indeed from the very notion of productivity. The dandiacal code, Baudelaire says, is very ancient; the dandy is stoical. Gardanne knew nothing of hormones – they were not ‘discovered’ until the early twentieth century, with the isolation of insulin, Oestrogen was not isolated until 1943, in time for the return of soldiers to their families, and the post-war return of women to domestic roles. In the nineteenth century the medical approaches to menopausal experience pertained to a theory of unblocking, as if the woman in question were suffering a kind of inner stagnation – George Sand, for example, was systematically lanced and bled by her doctor, to rid her of a persistent suffocating sensation, she told her sister in a letter. Windy climates could be advised, or light labour, to unblock the humours – gardening, wood sawing, walks and housework. It was suggested also that overheated salons should be avoided. So the menopausal condition was a blocked condition, rather than one of substantive lack. Now we consider that the menopausal body lacks oestrogen and accordingly pharmaceutical horse urine ‘replaces’ it; in the nineteenth century this female body lacked inner movement. Looking at the inverse of these historical assessments of female aging can provide a negative picture of what a woman is in a given era: currently a woman is a body containing oestrogen; in the nineteenth century a woman was a body containing inner flows and movements – the residual imagination perhaps, of the ancient idea of the migrant uterus. In the late eighteenth century, some menopausal definitions and therapies had been more cultural, having to do with a reassessment of the social and intellectual roles of women. After menopause the female was manlike, so could take on masculine practices. In 1803 the historian of medicine Moreau de la Sarthes proposed that: If, for the Scythians, to whom historians have attributed wisdom, men who lost their virility were obligated to take on the clothing and habits of women, why shouldn’t women, when the ability to conceive is finished, join the class of men in some ways, and so enjoy the same privileges, apply themselves to the liberal professions and to literary work, which often would give them a means of livelihood and consolation? So the historical movement of the concept of femininity, from social and cultural roles, to inner mobility and flux, to the possession of oestrogen, can be mapped on to a history of the treatments for the end of that femininity, in the menopausal body. So the historical movement of the concept of femininity, from social and cultural roles, to inner mobility and flux, to the possession of oestrogen, can be mapped on to a history of the treatments for the end of that femininity, in the menopausal body. The nineteenth-century invention of menopause as a deficit of femininity, treatable by medical means, must be seen in the more general context of the post-revolutionary privatization and enclosure of women’s lives and roles within the family, a condition that accompanied the generalization of industrial capitalism. If in the bourgeois ideology the female body was constrained to represent reproductive value, indeed, functioning as a kind of money (that other value in flux), once freed of this significatory role as she entered ‘l’age critique’, which was the then-common term, more familiar than the new medical appellation, her ruinous social presence problematized the very necessity of productivity. In this sense, in the nineteenth century capitalist city the image of the menopausal female enacts an urban destabilization along with that of the prostitute or courtesan, and these are two differently sexualized female guises that Baudelaire used to activate a sublime femininity in his symbolic vocabulary. Actresses and widows are similarly invoked in the poems as figures whose mysterious autonomy not only excites the poet’s empathy, but whose marginal existences outside the economy of domestic enclosure crucially animate the urban landscape, inciting an aesthetic of sensual decadence, ruinousness. These variously feminized bodies share with the dandy the sublime trait of a spiritualized and stoical superiority. The elderly woman sitting on a park bench listening to a military band is ‘still erect, proud’, ‘her eye opening from time to time like the eye of an old eagle; / her marble brow seemingly made for laurel...’ She is among those who, like the dandy, pertaining to more ancient codes of conduct, are stoic, without complaint. THE STATE HAS NO MENOPAUSE, ONLY PRODUCTIVITY AND LOSS. SHE HAS ENTERED AN UNDOCUMENTED CORPORALITY. EXCELLENT. NOW THE SCINTILLATING RESEARCH CAN BEGIN. THAT SHE EXISTS AND MOVES IN THE CITY IS AN AFFRONT TO THE WILL OF CAPITAL. COUNTLESS CLINICS ARE DEDICATED TO PREVENTING HER APPEARANCE. WHAT WALTER BENJAMIN SAID OF BAUDELAIRE SHE WILL CLAIM AS HER SLOGAN ALSO: ‘PERHAPS THIS IS BAUDELAIRE’S GREATEST ACHIEVEMENT, AND CERTAINLY IT IS ONE OF WHICH HE IS CONSCIOUS: TO HAVE BECOME SO QUICKLY OBSOLETE, WHILE REMAINING SO DURABLE’. HER OBSOLESCENCE IS INDISPENSABLE TO HER WORK WITH RESISTANCE. SHE WILL HAVE BECOME THE PHILOSOPHER OF HER OWN RUIN, WHICH IS ALSO THE RUINOUSNESS OF CAPITAL. BY ENTERING THE THEATRE OF THE STREET EACH DAY AND DISPLAYING THE DIGNITY OF HER IRRELEVANCE, SHE ALTERS THE INTERPRETATION OF NECESSITY . THE DANDY ASPIRES TO BE SUBLIME, CONTINUOUSLY; BUT LIKE A WEST-MOVING SUN, SHE HAS EFFORTLESSLY ENTERED INTO THE MENOPAUSAL SUBLIME, SETTING A PERENNIAL EXAMPLE FOR THE DANDIACAL CODE, WHATEVER IT IS YET TO BECOME. GREGARIOUSLY SHE EMBODIES THE BASIC INTENT OF BAUDELAIREANISM: ‘THE EXPLORATION OF THE LAST REALM OF INVENTIVENESS IN THE REALM OF FEELING’. UNLIKE ALMOST ANY OTHER ADULT HUMAN BODY, HERS NOW POSSESSES EXTRA ORGANS, ORGANS THAT HAVE ECLIPSED ALL USE VALUE. SHE WILL DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH HER INNER WEALTH, WHICH IS ENTIRELY AUTONOMOUS. AS SHE DRIFTS, SHE HUMS A LITTLE TUNE. WHAT IS THAT TUNE.